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“I feel like a filmmaker!” Denis Villeneuve exults, as he settles in for a Star interview during TIFF.

“My life is film right now, and it’s a deep pleasure. It’s a great time!”

Also a very tiring time, concedes the Quebec director, who long ago established his filmmaking bona fides. He’s been making movies for almost 20 years, including the Oscar-nominated Incendies in 2010 and the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring Enemy in 2013.

Now comes Sicario, a drug war thriller starring Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro, opening Friday, which competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May. He apologizes if he’s not up to speed on it, since he went straight from Cannes to making a sci-fi blockbuster with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.

It’s called Story of Your Life, out next year, and he’s currently editing that while prepping for his other big sci-fi movie, the Blade Runner sequel starring Harrison Ford, due in 2017.

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“I shot Story of Your Life all summer, and I just wrapped a week ago, so I was totally away from Sicario,” confesses the easygoing Villeneuve, 47.

“I didn’t have a second to think about Sicario or really deal with the movie. I was in a big storm, shooting the most complex movie I ever made so far.”

But duty calls, Sicario is the main agenda item, and he’s going to do his best to answer a few questions:

Emily Blunt’s FBI agent character in Sicario isn’t afraid to shoot her gun or fight men, but I’ve heard complaints that she’s too “passive.” I’d argue that she represents civilization in a lawless environment.

Totally! Exactly! She represents the fragility of civilization, and it’s tough. That was a big challenge in this film, in that she is also the only woman. We tried very hard to make it not look like a comment on femininity. She represents the fragility of democracy and the law and the beauty at the same time.

Wasn’t her character originally written as male?

That’s a very delicate thing. It was written for a woman from the start, but at one point there was (studio) pressure to transform the part into a male part, although this pressure was not on me. It was on the screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, to transform the part into a male part, because from a commercial point of view, to finance movies where the lead is a female, it’s more difficult. There’s less money for that.

It’s crazy, but that’s the reality of it. But Taylor said, ‘F--- off!’ and I love him for that. Taylor is a cowboy, he’s someone who has guts. He has balls. He said, “I’d rather not do the movie than to change the part,” and I think that is very good.

Sicario shows the insidious problem of the drug cartels, but expresses uncertainty about the “end justifies the means” stance of Josh Brolin’s anti-cartel fighters. Does this represent your mixed emotions?

The goal was to raise questions and not bring answers. Because honestly, from a humble point of view, I don’t know. At which point is evil so without hope that you know you cannot have a conversation? That you need to use force? Where is the right scale to do that? And sometimes you don’t have the choice, but there will always be a counterpart. We went into Iraq, to go against the Taliban, and now we have to deal with a worse evil, ISIS.

I don’t have the answers. And at the same time, with something like ISIS, I think we have to use violence because those guys are totally out of their minds. But what will this create after? Violence doesn’t seem to be the solution.

Did making Sicario turn you from a dove into a hawk?

I’ve always been a peace type, but the thing I noticed from my research is that the more pressure you put on the drug lords, on the border, the more you give them power. The best thing that happened for the drug lords was when the U.S. decided to create the “war on drugs.” Then it became more expensive to buy drugs and the drug lords became more powerful.

At the same time, what’s happening in Mexico is quite frightening. Democracy can be so fragile at one point that the institution disintegrates, and that people cannot trust their own institutions any more because of the fragility of it. I think what’s happening in Mexico is a big lesson for everybody. Corruption is a strong beast.

Sicario is a puzzle box of a movie, with motives and actions always in doubt. You love making intricately plotted films, don’t you?

At the beginning of Enemy there’s a phrase: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” from José Saramago’s The Double, the book the film is basedupon. And I think I love life being like that. You embrace chaos like that. I love the idea that when you start to shoot life with a camera, it slowly starts to make sense in front of your eyes, as if you’re making a documentary. I like to approach fiction in the same way.

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